Yasser Arafat was born in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, according to the consistent findings of various biographers. Arafat, on the other hand, often claimed to have been born in Palestine, giving contradictory information over time. Sometimes he claimed to have been born in the Old City of Jerusalem, sometimes in the Gaza Strip.
It is certain that his father was from Gaza and his mother from a distinguished Jerusalem family. They had married in the 1920s and emigrated to Cairo. Yasser was the sixth of seven children. When he was about four years old, his mother died. To relieve his father with the six half-orphans, his mother's brother, Salim Abu Saud, took Jassir and his younger brother to live with him in Jerusalem, which was then part of the British Mandate of Palestine. He lived there for four years.
Early years
When he returned to Cairo after his father's remarriage, he attended school and later university, where he studied electrical engineering. For a time, he occupied himself with Jewish culture, had Jewish acquaintances and read Zionist works, e.g. by Theodor Herzl. In 1946, Arafat is said to have had intensive contact with Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem who collaborated with the German National Socialists and who had found asylum in Egypt. Al-Husseini was a distant relative of Arafat. However, that he was Arafat's uncle is a legend.
Arafat was now actively involved in the Arab national movement in Palestine. At this time he was a proponent of military confrontation and procured weapons that were smuggled into the Mandate territory. In Cairo, Yasser Arafat had befriended Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini, who led units of Palestinian Arabs in the Jerusalem region. When Arafat heard of Abdel Khader al-Husseini's death in the Palestine War at the Battle of Mount Kastel in April 1948, he abandoned his studies in Cairo and took an active part in the war. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood, which fought in the Gaza Strip and in the battle of Kfar Darom.
When the Egyptian army intervened in the Palestine war on May 15, 1948, Arafat and his unit were ordered to withdraw. This was a formative experience for him. He later accused the Arab states of treason for not helping the Palestinians win the battle and not allowing them to fight. The Palestinian Arabs suffered a military defeat at the hands of Israel. About 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or took flight and from then on lived mostly as stateless people in neighboring countries.
In the 1950s Arafat studied at Cairo University. In 1952 he founded the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS), which he headed until 1957.
In late 1952, he was temporarily arrested after a failed assassination attempt on Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser.
In 1956 he left the university with a degree in engineering and founded the Union of Palestinian University Graduates. He then volunteered for the Egyptian army and fought in the 1956 Suez War against France, Britain and Israel. He was a lieutenant in the Egyptian army and was considered an explosives expert. That same year he went to Kuwait where he worked as an engineer and became a successful contractor.
Foundation of Fatah
In 1957, together with Chalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), he founded the first cell of the Movement for the Liberation of Palestine (al-Fatah) in Kuwait, from which the political party of the same name emerged in 1959. From 1958 Arafat was a member of the executive committee and from 1968 chairman of Fatah.
Through his active participation in the Battle of Karame in 1968, he established his heroic myth, and from 1969 he was chairman of the PLO, which had been created by the Arab League in 1964.
By the late 1960s, tensions between the PLO and the Jordanian government were growing; Palestinian militias (Fedayin) had effectively established a state within the state of Jordan and controlled strategic positions such as the oil refineries at Zarqa. Jordan viewed these circumstances as a growing threat to its sovereignty and security and sought to disarm the Palestinian militias. In June 1970, after a failed Palestinian assassination attempt on the Jordanian king, open fighting broke out, ending with the PLO fleeing Jordan for Lebanon. If the Battle of Karame was considered the PLO's first historic victory, under Arafat's leadership it suffered a major defeat in 1970 with Black September. The latter had to flee first to Cairo, then to Lebanon.
Arafat's historic appearance before the UN General Assembly on November 13, 1974, in which he delivered a speech in uniform, kufiya and holstered pistol, was met with enthusiasm by Arab and Communist states. In the speech, Arafat claimed sole power over Palestine for the PLO. He spoke of wanting to create a world without colonialism, imperialism, neo-colonialism and without "racism in all its forms, including Zionism." Arafat avoided speaking of Israel as denying the state any legitimacy, and instead used the term Zionist entity. In this speech, he portrayed Zionism as an imperialist, colonialist and racist ideology that - decidedly reactionary and discriminatory - was on a par with anti-Semitism. He also repeated an old anti-Semitic stereotype, according to which Zionism wants Jews to show no loyalty to their homelands and to elevate themselves above their fellow citizens. He denied the UN the right to divide the Palestinians' indivisible homeland, rejecting the 1947 partition decision. He also claimed that the Palestine War of 1948 was started by Israel and not by the Arab states.
The PLO was granted observer status at the UN as the legitimate political representation of the Palestinians. The Palestinian scarf - draped like the contours of Palestine - was, like the holster, also later one of his trademarks, without which he rarely appeared.
He gave another important speech on 13 December 1988, in which the PLO acknowledged the UN resolution and showed a willingness to compromise. However, Arafat wanted the violent actions of the PLO to be understood as legitimate resistance. This speech also reaffirmed the interpretation of UN General Assembly Resolution 194, according to which it guaranteed the right of return of Palestinian refugees, thus establishing a doctrine that still holds today, at least in official PLO pronouncements. In the speech, Arafat did not explicitly concede to the Jews a right to national self-determination and did not explicitly accept that Israel could be a Jewish state.
As a consequence of the Israeli campaign in Lebanon against the PLO headquarters in Beirut in July/August 1982, Arafat had to flee to Tunisia. He left Israeli-occupied Beirut with his followers and established a new PLO headquarters in exile in Tunis.
The path to international recognition
In 1988, Arafat indirectly recognized Israel and in 1989 declared the 1964 PLO Charter, which called for the destruction of the state of Israel, null and void.
In 1990, Arafat welcomed the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and showed solidarity with Saddam Hussein. The rich Arab oil states, alongside the war-opposing USA, then froze their financial support for the PLO. Another consequence was the expulsion of the Palestinians from Kuwait in 1991. Within a few days, some 450,000 Palestinians had to leave Kuwait. This and the loss of essential supporters in the Arab world led Arafat in 1993 to undertake peace negotiations with Israel on behalf of the PLO, which led to mutual recognition.
Instead of waiting for the end, Arafat sympathized with the coup plotters in 1991 while the August coup against Mikhail Gorbachev was still underway, angering a longtime supporter.
On April 7, 1992, Arafat survived a crash of an Air Bissau passenger plane due to a sandstorm in the Libyan desert. Arafat underwent several brain surgeries and right eye surgeries by surgeon Meftah Shwedy in a hospital in Misrata due to a blood clot.
On September 13, 1993, at the signing of the Declaration of Principles on Temporary (Palestinian) Self-Government between the State of Israel and the PLO in Washington, there was a historic handshake between Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Jizhak Rabin. Nobel Peace Prize winner Rabin later paid for this concession in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with his life through a terrorist attack by a Jewish ultra-nationalist.
After 27 years of exile, Arafat returned to Palestine on July 1, 1994, as a result of the autonomy agreement and formed an autonomous government in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority.
In 1993, TIME magazine selected The Peacemakers (Nelson Mandela, Frederik Willem de Klerk, Yasser Arafat, and Yitzchak Rabin) as its Persons of the Year.
In December 1994, Arafat received the Nobel Peace Prize together with Shimon Peres and Yitzchak Rabin. During the week of mourning for Yitzchak Rabin following his assassination in November 1995, Arafat visited Leah Rabin and her family in their Tel Aviv apartment to express his condolences. It was the first time he had set foot on Israeli soil. For security reasons, he had not been able to attend the funeral ceremonies. He described how upset he had been by the murder and how distraught he was at having lost his partner in the peace process. In 1995, Arafat received the German Media Prize in Baden-Baden.
In 2000, Arafat negotiated the creation of a Palestinian state with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and US President Clinton at Camp David. However, the negotiations failed. The outgoing President Clinton and Barak, who was replaced shortly afterwards in a general election by his political opponent Ariel Sharon, blamed Arafat alone for the failure of these negotiations. Arafat, on the other hand, blamed Barak and Clinton for the failure.
Second Intifada and political decline
Even before the Second Intifada, Arafat was accused of playing a double game. While he was campaigning for peace and diplomacy in the international arena, he was said to have stirred up anti-Israel sentiment in front of his supporters in Gaza with partly anti-Semitic speeches. He has also been accused on several occasions of actively participating in arms smuggling for paramilitary and terrorist purposes (see the Karine A affair) and of making the autonomous authority's security forces, which he alone commands, available for attacks on Israel. There were also reports from British media such as the BBC that terrorist organizations such as the Fatah-affiliated al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades were being indirectly funded by EU money through the Arafat-ruled PA. Finally, he tolerated or supported the renewed Palestinian uprising, which isolated him above all in foreign policy terms.
In response to the Second Intifada, Israel repeatedly occupied parts of the autonomous Palestinian territories. The Israeli government also held Arafat himself responsible for violent attacks. Beginning in 2001, Arafat, who lives in Ramallah, was placed under house arrest by Israel on several occasions. His helicopters were destroyed in December 2001, preventing him from traveling between Gaza and Ramallah. As part of Operation Protective Shield from March 29, 2002 to May 3, 2002, the Israeli army destroyed part of Arafat's headquarters, the Muqāta'a. On September 11, 2003, the Israeli government took the decision to expel Arafat. He was to be taken by helicopter to exile in North Africa. Following the expulsion decision, tens of thousands of Palestinians took to the streets in protest. Arafat appealed to the population to resist the decision. He said he would "rather die than surrender".
On September 14, 2003, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert also presented an assassination attempt on Arafat as a legitimate possibility for his removal. On September 16, 2003, the United States allowed a Security Council resolution against Arafat's expulsion to fail because of its veto. Germany abstained from voting.
Corruption
In May 2002, the BND stated that the use of EU funds for terrorism "could not be ruled out" because Arafat apparently did not separate the structure of the autonomy regime from his Fatah movement. The report further speaks of "known mismanagement" and "widespread corruption" (file number 39C-04/2/02).
At the time, the USA and Israel had already repeatedly called on the European Union in Brussels to examine the use of subsidies for the Palestinian Authority more closely. Brussels explained that the International Monetary Fund was responsible for the transparency and control of the subsidies. However, in 2003 the IMF presented a report on "Economic Performance and Reforms under Conflict Conditions", which showed that between 1995 and 2000 more than 900 million dollars in subsidies for the Palestinian Authority "disappeared". Only Arafat and "close associates" had the authority to direct the use of the money. According to the report, Arafat alone controlled 8% of the total Palestinian budget until his death.
Family
Arafat had been married to Suha at-Tawil, with whom he has a daughter, Zahwa (* 24 July 1995 in Neuilly-sur-Seine), since 17 July 1990. From the beginning of the second Intifada, in 2001, the wife and daughter lived in Paris and Tunis. In 2007 Suha moved to Malta.
His nephew Musa Arafat was head of Palestinian military intelligence, his brother Fathi Arafat a medical doctor.
